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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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reckoned by centuries instead of single years, could accumulate
experience and knowledge such as we never can in our fleeting
threescore years and ten. May we not, too, imagine in these
stellar worlds, beings who would no more allow themselves to
be bound down to their island worlds by mere space than we
permitted ourselves to be confined to land by the ocean;
beings, who, as Columbus crossed the ocean to discover a new
world beyond his own, would set out through the depths of
space to communicate with other worlds around them? And,
lastly, amid all these millions of worlds, may we not conceive of
societies as superior to our own as ours is to the savage tribes
about us—societies where culture of the mind, where sympathy
and love, and all that is noblest in man's moral nature, have
attained their highest development, and are given fullest play?
In many such ways as these, may we not imagine beings
more perfect than ourselves to exist in the realms of light
above? And, fanciful as these conjectures may seem, they are
in no way beyond the bounds of possibility, and indulgence
in such fancies is of deep practical use in making us realize
more clearly what our true position in the vast universe
really is. The simple nomads, whom from time to time I
used to meet in the desert, looking up into the heavens with
a keenness of sight such as is only granted to these dwellers
in the wilderness, saw only a number of bright specks, which
one by one disappeared below the horizon, and reappeared
in apparently the same places on the following evening.
Towards morning they would see a round of light appear,
which would slowly pass across the sky and disappear, like
the stars, below the western horizon. Day after day, night
after night, the same process would be repeated, the stars by
night and the sun by day, coursing over the heavens.
And what did these children of the desert think of these
phenomena? Simply this, that what they seemed to see was
really what they saw—that the small ball of fire by day
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